CSotD: Humor! Now With Extra Juxtapositions!
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Caulfield ponders the change in seasons, and is accurate enough to say summer “kind of” starts with Memorial Day. To my mind, it’s perfectly logical that summer “kind of” ends with Labor Day, because that was when we’d head back to school.
Several decades ago, when my boys were little, Colorado schools tried starting school just before Labor Day and ending just after Memorial Day, which sparked a riot among parents who demanded that families get one or the other of those weekends upon which to build a week-long vacation.
Schools in Denver are now in session from the middle of August to the end of June, so families and the tourist industry lost that one. Here in New Hampshire it’s similar, though our tourist season ends Columbus Day along with leaf-peeping season.
I had a GF who taught in LA’s year-round schools and liked it, except that the short, scattered school breaks hopscotched around such that families with more than one kid never seemed to have a time when everyone was free. But the overall topic brings us to our first
Juxtaposition of the Day
Looking forward to summer break was a big deal, but it had its limitations, starting with the fact that our school district stretched 30 miles down the highway, so I had friends I wouldn’t see again until September.
But Heller comes up with the other factor, which is that I grew up in a world where most families got along on one salary, so the issue of what to do with us didn’t come up so much, and my own time as a young parent was likewise a time when a lot of kids — no longer “most” — hung out because there was a parent at home.
In Colorado Springs, our parks department had a summer program where little kids went and did craft projects and played games for a few hours. They called it “Tot Lot,” which seems more appropriate than it ought to have been.
Paul Noth has a way of cutting to the bone that can make you laugh and shudder at the same time, and the burden of having to pay attention to your kids is rich grounds for such humor.
When we were taking LaMaze classes before the birth of our second son, a psychiatrist and his wife were there for their first, and he explained that crying is a learned behavior and that, if our baby cried, we should see if it was hungry or had a diaper pin stuck in it and, if not, just leave it, lest we reinforce the behavior.
Those of us who had already reinforced our own behavior of giving a damn about our kid protested, but his wife said that he had a doctorate, which forcefully ended the dispute but left me curious about how their kid turned out after spending 18 years in a Skinner box.
Which, despite popular lore, Deborah Skinner did not.
Only certain species of birds regurgitate to feed their chicks, but once word got out, a lot of cartoonists ran with it. Ben’s daughter, however, is more like a robin, dropping tasty whole worms into her child’s mouth.
I was looking for a source that would say how widespread the regurgitation method is, and came across a query about how it is triggered. It contained this wonderful sentence:
The feeding process with birds is an incredibly complex operation, not all birds regurgitate and not all of them would regurgitate just from physically seeing their young.
Which sounds like it belongs with that Paul Noth cartoon.
In any case, when I was a child, parents did not simulate birds but, rather, airplanes:
Juxtaposition At The Other End of Life
Here’s a cheerful pair of cartoons that happened to both publish yesterday. Wiley often features graveyards in his work, primarily to make jokes about what is engraved on the headstones, but somehow he and McCoy both found humor in feigning death.
Which is okay with me, because I was a big fan of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which was more about soul-killing corporate life than about faking your own death, but both are featured, and that link will provide several clips that ought to amuse you, if you’re into dark humor and not too fond of corporations.
And if you’re not into death humor, you’ll enjoy this life-affirming fantasy. I’m at the point where I wouldn’t mind a factory-reset as long as I didn’t have to relearn things like walking, talking and driving with a manual transmission.
I suppose before the anesthetist put you under, you’d have a chance to click the box that preserves your documents. Or maybe a list, since we all have some we’d be hoping to overwrite.
Juxtaposition of the Day #3
This pair showed up back-to-back on my GoComics page this morning. It seemed strange, since most Jeff Goldblum gags involve velociraptors. Perhaps it’s a David Hedison reference.
When I went to find out who played the role in the 1958 version, I discovered that one of the writers was James Clavell who I’ll bet didn’t brag much about that line on his CV, given the other arrows he had in his quiver.
But it paid some bills, and became a classic. Nothing wrong with that.
Brian Bassett scores again with this Sunday strip, which is a cute enough gag but struck me particularly for the layout. Sundays offer a larger canvas, but not everyone takes advantage of that real estate, and certainly not to this inventive, appropriate extent.
Different kind of brilliance, because I remember when Alaska became a state and the phrase was that it became “49 in ’59,” next to which Hawaii’s admission later that year seemed anticlimactic.
Wikipedia reports that the title “Hawaii Five-O” was indeed based on that being the 50th state, but it never occurred to me, just as I never assumed everyone on the A-Team had a name beginning with that letter. Which they didn’t.
Good catch by Wayno and Piraro. Good reunion cover by the Ventures.
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